Red Hat Updates OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat officially announced the general availability of its OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 release on April 13, providing new application container features.

OpenShift is Red Hat's packaged distribution of the open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system. The OpenShift 3.5 update is based on the Kubernetes 1.5 update that was released in December 2016. (Kubernetes 1.6, the most recent release of Kubernetes, debuted on March 29.)

StatefulSets Debuts in OpenShift Container Platform 3.5

Among the primary new capabilities introduced by Kubernetes 1.5 is support for Windows hosts, which is a feature Red Hat helped to develop, though it's not a feature the company is highlighting in its OpenShift 3.5 update. Among Red Hat's highlighted features in OpenShift is StatefulSets, which technically is only a preview in the Kubernetes 1.5 update.

The StatefulSets feature was originally known as PetSet, and as the current name implies, it's all about stateful applications. Containers initially were not generally deployed as stateful applications, but as enterprise use cases have grown, the model has changed.

There is now an active need for organizations to also enable stateful services, particularly for SQL databases, which is something that StatefulSets helps to enable.

Java support had previously been available in OpenShift, but it has been expanded with the 3.5 update with a new Java container image for cloud-native workloads.

As a tech preview, OpenShift 3.5 includes Kubernetes Network Policy.

"Put simply, Network Policy is an easy way for Project Administrators to define exactly what ingress traffic is allowed to any pod, from any other pod, including traffic from pods located in other projects," Marc Curry, Principal Product Manager, Container Infrastructure at Red Hat, wrote in a blog post.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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